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Archives for February 2009

Working With AdWords Placement Campaigns

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I have been focusing a lot over the last few weeks on the creation and optimisation of Google AdWords placement campaigns on the content network. Before I go into the tactics and a few fresh ideas that I am currently playing with, those of you new to the blog may be asking the question…

What is a placement campaign?

A Google AdWords placement campaign allows you find pick which websites that participate in the AdSense program you want your advertisements to show on. Instead of relying on Googles contextual matching of keywords that you specify to the content of sites, the placement campaign bypasses this, and allows you to use your intelligence to find sites that you believe will provide visitors to click on your ad, and more importantly convert into sales or actions.

TEXT PLACEMENT AD

STANDARD CONTENT NETWORK AD

One of the main advantages of placement campaign ads is that they take over the whole ad block. Instead of showing your ad with four other competitors inside the ad block, the placement ads take over the WHOLE ad block. It doesn’t matter if you are using text ads or image ads, the whole bit of valuable site real estate is yours. BUT, it does come at a price (doesn’t everything).

Using Placement Campaigns

To take out the placement ad block, you must bid higher than the top content bidder for that ad block on the site. But this can be more than compensated for by thinking laterally, and placing your ads on sites that have a similar demographic to your target market. These sites are running ads from a different but demographically related niche, so you can bid against cheaper keywords, and get a lot of content traffic without going head to head with your competition.

For example, you may know from market research that the people that buy your widgets also listen to heavy metal. Sure you can run content network ads, and then pick the winners by running an AdWords Placement performance report. This is a good initial strategy to find out if these heavy metal music keywords ads are being shown, and what the average cost per click is. Once you determine where the ads are being shown, and the type of sites that are converting then you can transfer these winning domains into a placement campaign, and optimise the advertising spend on each of these sites individually. Placement campaigns allow you to change individual bids on each url, instead of bidding on keywords. This allows you to fine tune each and every site that you know converts well, making sure that you pay the maximum needed to get your ads shown on that domain.

Placement campaigns are also excellent for targeting large blocks of related content within large news and social media sites. I will give a few examples here of some ninja style tactics for finding placements. There are many more …..

1. Set up a Google alert to search for all news stories that feature your niches or product areas. Most news sites, at least here in Australia show content network ads on story pages, and these make excellent placements. Remember, that these articles can get massive surges of traffic, but they are timely, so some form of alert system is needed to make sure you maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.

2. Buy up blocks of related niche content within social media. Say for instance that there was a popular social video site that showed Adsense content ads. You could do an internal search on that site for all of your keywords, record the url’s of the results and then run placement ads on all of those URL’s within the site. These pages get thousands of visitors per day.

PLACEMENT TIPS

Here are a few other tips that are fresh on my mind:

  • Use AdWords Editor for setting up placements. Make your job so much easier, and can easily template whole setups and copy them to new campaigns.
  • Specify the placement url without the http:// Google doesn’t like it.
  • No placements over three directories deep. Not sure why Google doesn’t allow this, as it makes targeting on social media sites a lot harder to accomplish. You can put ads on www.last.fm/group/tool but not on search.url.com/lyrics/q/james+blunt+high+lyrics because the target url has more than 2 slashes in it

Call us now to discuss your Adwords campaigns

1300 975 224

info@squareeyes.com.au

Google Adword Campaign Strategy Is Important

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New users to AdWords often find the system very challenging, or the return on investment simply does not add up because they make a number of common mistakes.

The problem that most new starters get into when setting up their AdWords campaign is that they don’t approach the subject with an analytical mind. Once people get a basic understanding how PPC advertising works, and sign up for an AdWords account, they hastily throw together a campaign with ill defined goals and no actual strategy behind it.

A lot of people have been burnt by PPC advertising because they have failed to take the time to set up an easy to manage and optimise campaign. Failure to manage a campaign through a number of critical stages, and poor initial campaign design leads to a drop in quality score for your campaigns over time. When this happens, the cost per click for all of your keywords goes through the roof, and it leads to a lot people becoming disgruntled with AdWords in general, and feeling like Google is greedy and grabbing at cash.

This is the furhest thing from the truth in my opinion. A well thought out AdWords campaign is one of the best ways to draw traffic to your product or service.

If you currently are running AdWords, a simple way you can get some control over the direction of your PPC marketing is to review the way your campaigns are organised.

Don’t think about campaigns and AdGroups as just simply a place to put keywords that have similar themes. The structure of campaign and AdGroups should be thought of as individual experiment. This is the place where combinations of keywords and advertising copy are being tested against each other.  It is very easy to make comparisons of results between individual AdGroups, or advertisements and keywords within AdGroups. You can find clear trends and winners by testing like keywords and ads with only small variations. This makes it easy to see which factor is in play and has increased CTR, conversions or Quality Score.

This separation of data is important to think about when setting up AdGroups. Try as hard as possible to keep your data ‘clean’, and not muddy the results by having unrelated areas and types of keywords in the same AdGroup, or even the same campaign. For instance, i always have brand related keywords in a separate campaign, as these then to have a higher CTR and skew the results of the other campaigns.

This should be taken into consideration for the life of the campaign. If a keyword is dominating a campaign or AdGroup, you should consider isolating it and creating an expanded AdGroup for it.
This makes it easier to test variations on this proven winner and further increase its performance.  There is a fine line to walk here, as Google likes to see a high CTR for campaigns, and if you drastically reduce the CTR by removing all of the high performing keywords, the quality score will lower and the average CPC for the campaign will increase.

As for everything, testing and measuring is the key to success.

Contact us to discuss your Adwords campaigns

1300 975 224

info@squareeyes.com.au